14 August 2013

Pilkington Jackson's Bruce statue at Bannockburn: did Pilkington know that Bruce was a thug?

have
any of you not yet read Andy Wightman's The Poor Had No Lawyers:
Who owns Scotland and how they got it (2013)?
If not, you really should, attentively, in its entirety. By the term
'Citizens of Scotland' I mean all those currently resident in
Scotland, irrespective of whether or not these people have got
permanent resident status, or whether these people are asylum-seekers
or people born in Scotland, whether they're living off benefits or
going out to a paid-job everyday. If you argue in detail for
intelligent, low-cost policy like Wightman does, then you don't waste
your time supporting or enforcing stupid, high-cost policy, like
over-policing borders – apparently in Salmond's future models we'll
still be paying for an over-policed UK border – or persecuting
minorities who can't be squeezed into the template of Mrs & Mr
Normal. Wightman's is the first book I've ever read on public policy
that's electrified me. He campaigns for diversifying Scottish
land-ownership – our current pattern is the most feudal, most
concentrated in western Europe – and taxing speculation on urban &
rural land, so that people who want to get up & do something with
their hands & minds get rewarded. Rather than rewarding those who
happen to have the hundreds of thousands spare to invest in chunks of
land, do nothing with it and enjoy returns of up to 200% – value
added by the economic activity of normal workers, i.e. us – for
that doing of nothing.